I know many of my regular readers sometimes struggle with marketing. It can be a hard thing to understand if it’s not your trade. Really as a writer, you want to focus on your writing. So having to waste time on learning about marketing is the only way to ensure those efforts can pay off. But if you don’t know the jargon, you may get lost in the marketing sea.

A/B Split

This is a method for determining which format works better. It involves two different web pages that are shown to the same kind of people and determining which one has better engagement levels. It’s also a term used to describe a type of email testing.

Alt text

Alt text is generally used when displaying images on a website to help Google and other search engines to index the site more accurately and contribute towards its rank.

Brand

The brand is the image and personality associated with you or your company. Successful brands will employ consistent images, colour schemes and logos across the board to ensure everything is branded and in line with company/individual values.

Branding

This is the act of implementing brand identifiers across the board. You can describe something as having excellent branding.

Content Audit

A content audit is the process of evaluating the content on your website. It’s good to occasional go through and audit your current content to assess it for suitability, quality and relevance to your overall aims.

Content Marketing

This is the act of using content to promote yourself. Content marketing has become something of a desired business to be in and is a cleverly structured why of developing followers and gradually converting them into paying customers through valuable assets.

CTA

This is an acronym for Call to Action. A CTA can be anything and anywhere. It is basically a button or link that encourages you as a reader to do something, like when you visit a website and click on a ‘Read more…’ button.

Email marketing

Email marketing is what would be considered as a newsletter. It’s the use of emails to market yourself, or your product to drive traffic to your site or purchase your product.

Hits

‘Hits’ is a term that refers to your page views but is often confused. The true definition of a hit is each time a file is sent to a browser. For example. If a visitor comes across a page with five images, this will count as one page view, however you will gain one hit per image (as each will be sent individually to the browser in order to load) and then one for the html page. Therefore we have 6 hits but only one page view.

HTML

HTML is the coding used to build websites. It is the language of the internet and controls everything that we see on the page. Changing the HTML code will invariably change what you see.

Long tail keywords

Keywords are specific words within a text that is most significant. It acts as a tool for SEO. Long tail keywords are more than just a single word and can include whole phrases. The significance of using long tail keywords means that your content can be ranked higher in smaller categories. For example, the keyword ‘writing’ will be harder to rank for than ‘writing better blog posts’.

Meta description

A meta description is part of the HTML coding that indexes the page for search engines. It’s normally a short snippet of words (maximum 160 characters) that gives an overview of the text – much like a blurb for a book – and is listed within search rankings.

RSS feed

The RSS feed of a blog is a way of formatting and delivering content on a website. Viewing your RSS feed gives you direct access to all the content in one place without the necessity of visiting the site and is often used as a subscription tool for fans.

SEO

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation and it refers to how search engines like Google rank web pages. SEO has a lot to do with keywords, optimised writing and meta tags. When formatted correctly, SEO will help Google to better establish who you are and what you’re niche topic is.

Strategy

Strategy is a term that is used a lot, whether it’s your blogging strategy, content strategy or marketing strategy. It basically refers to your action plan and the planned out steps you will be taking in order to achieve your goal.